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Improve Firefox response times

As a network specialist, I've always been interested into protocols. More specifically, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is used for web access, allows for several transfers through one single TCP connection. This is called HTTP pipelining, and it has been extensively described in Internet standards. Actually, this is not a new topic, since the W3C proved in 1997 the interest to add pipelining to HTTP version 1.1.

What is new, however, is the broadening usage of Firefox to browse the web.

By default Firefox has a conservative setting and it makes only one request to a web page at a time. Moreover, this clever piece of software may benefit from HTTP pipelining. You just have to activate it properly. When you enable pipelining Firefox makes several requests at once, which really speeds up page loading.

The good news to Windows users is that you don't even have to compromise the registry database. Firefox features a nice configuration panel, and setting new parameters is really very simple.

Basically, we want Firefox to transmit several requests on a single TCP connection before recieving any replies. Ok, let's go:

[*] Launch Firefox and type "about:config" into the address bar. Then hit return. Don't be afraid by the large number of parameters that are displayed. Entries are ordered in alphabetical order. Scroll down and look for the network.http.pipelining entry.

[*] Right-click on the "network.http.pipelining" and invert its value to set it to true.

[*] Right-click on the "network.http.maxrequests" and change its value (it was set to 4 on my workstation) to 8. This means Firefox will submit up to 8 requests at once, which is the limit suggested into the HTTP/1.1 standard.

[*] Close everything and re-open Firefox to take new parameters into account.

Some people have proposed to set the maximum number of requests to a higher value, or to tweak the Gecko rendering engine. Of course, you can play with these suggestions if you like.

But remind that we should stay away from the Dark Side of the Force.

Personnally, I am relunctant to depart from default settings. Therefore, changes proposed above are minimum compared to the benefit in response time. These have been checked against several Windows and Unix YACS server with success, and I hope you will enjoy improved performance as well.

-- May the Force be With You!